Why Are Some Educators Obsessed with Eliminating All Accountability from School?

Why are people so weird about compliance in education, right?

Historically, people were weird about compliance in one direction of like the, I will make you comply, I'm the adult, you have to listen to me, kind of like Mrs.

Trunchbull from Matilda, right?

There's this stereotype of the educator who's super compliance oriented in a way that's just like too extreme and too weird.

But what we're seeing today, I think is the exact opposite of that.

People are kind of overreacting to that stereotype of the educator who's compliance obsessed and being compliance obsessed in the other direction and instead saying, no, all compliance is bad.

We can't have any compliance aspect to anything.

And I think that is just as weird an obsession to look for compliance when it's not even really there and to try to extract any compliance component from something as innocuous as an assignment, right?

Like just the number of educators who are insisting these days that late work has to always be accepted without any points off, just without any conditions, because otherwise you're just grading compliance.

That is just such a weird obsession with compliance, where it's really not the point, it's not what it's about.

Trying to extract this compliance component so that you could then delete it, i think just ruins the experience that you're trying to delete it from because it's not a natural separation to say well all i care about is their learning i don't care about the following directions or the deadline or the compliance component because compliance is bad like really compliance is bad i think it's bad to be weirdly obsessed with compliance but in either direction like if you are so insistent that students don't need to turn in their work by a given deadline like how are students going to benefit from their education?

The whole idea of an education is that you are following the lead of someone else who knows what they're doing, who has a course of study for you to follow.

And if you refuse to follow that course of study because compliance is bad to you, how are you going to benefit from that?

How is that different from, hey, you have internet access and you have a library?

You could learn that way.

But I feel like the purpose of being in an educational environment, of having a teacher, of taking a class, of being in a school, is to benefit from some of that accountability and some of that structure that wouldn't be there if you were just on your own teaching yourself.

And I think we don't recognize the work that that compliance aspect does.

Again, we don't need to be obsessive or weird about it.

We don't need to overemphasize the compliance aspect, but we also don't need to demonize and villainize the compliance aspect to the point that students don't actually get the accountability and the structure and the self-discipline and the learning that they're supposed to get out of their education.

And one place where this keeps coming up in such a weird way is with report cards and grading, right?

take any points off at all for late work or missing work even like even when students don't do their work at all people are calling it compliance to not give kids a perfect grade for that like it's not grading compliance exactly but like why would you want to extract the compliance component from something just like this this push towards standards-based grading i think is is part of that as well it's not necessary to only grade students on their pure absolute learning.

It's not necessary to only grade students on their mastery of the standards and try to say that compliance and turning it in on time and following the directions and all that is somehow like a separate thing.

Let me know what you think about this.